Ioannidis, J. P. (2018). Meta-research: Why research on research matters. PLoS biology, 16(3), e2005468.
According to John Ioannidis of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), whatever else that the words meta-research may convey to the reader, this relatively new young discipline is the study of bias (Ioannidis 2018:1/6). What I find interesting is that Ioannidis (2018) is very clearly and firmly situated within the positivism/positivism (a research paradigm, the oldest worldview on ‘science’ and its method). Thus, unlike my other reflective reviews, this one will intersperse more articles on the topic to round out the authorial stances and viewpoints. While research on research matters indeed (Ioannidis 2018), the how and why it matters will differ according to what, where, with whom, and from which viewpoint (research paradigm/worldview) one approaches the very notion of research as scientific engagement. For instance, in my school of design research, scientific acts (Sato 2000) are undertaken with the aim to improve design performance in the world (Poggenpohl & Sato 2009); and, if a better means to understand and represent our ‘users’ may be necessary to overcome embedded bias in the method or tool or practice implemented to elicit understanding of a people, then it follows that one’s user-centric design practice will inevitably improve with illumination of blindspots. Here, for this blogpost I do not quibble between user-centric and human-centric although there are strands of design research discourse which do. Here, I am using the best word for clarity of communication to the widest audience, not just within the confines of academic discourse.
McGee, R. G., & Dawson, A. C. (2020). Fake news and fake research: Why meta‐research matters more than ever. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 56(12), 1868-1871.
“Meta-researchers study, analyse and critique the research pathway”(McGee & Dawson 2020:1868). And, because my own meta-research sits outside the dominant research paradigms of the scientific method espoused by McGee & Dawson (2020) I will reverse the order of the words used by the authors’ to describe the elements which meta-researchers focus on, such as how to conduct, how to test, how to communicate, how to verify, and how to reward. That is, meta-research focuses on the most important set of How To questions in the pursuit of systematic knowledge production (“research”). What I discarded from the original sentence structure is the word choice made by McGee & Dawson (2020) such as “reproducibility” with “how to verify” next to it in brackets. These are reflections of the set of assumptions encapsulated by their research paradigm; positivism or postpositivism which underpins ‘the’ scientific method. This is not to imply that research using an interpretivist or constructivist paradigm is not science but that there has been a long and contentious history where qualitative methodologies (originally called naturalistic inquiry by Egon Guba) had to battle for legitimacy, recognition, and respect in the corridors of knowledge production. Thus, my preference for the clarity yet flexibility of the “how to” explanations used by McGee & Dawson (2020) to describe the interests of meta-research, including my own. They are more flexible for application across a range of research paradigms.
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